Slowly but surely, too, his gifts
as an attractive public speaker were becoming known. In 1837 he
wrote and delivered an able address before the Young Men's Lyceum
of Springfield. In December, 1839, Stephen A. Douglas, the most
brilliant of the young Democrats then in Springfield, challenged
the young Whigs of the town to a tournament of political
speech-making, in which Lincoln bore a full and successful share.
The man who could not pay a week's board bill was again elected
to the legislature, was invited to public banquets and toasted by
name, became a popular speaker, moved in the best society of the
new capital, and made, as his friends and neighbors declared, a
brilliant marriage.
IV. CONGRESSMAN LINCOLN
Hopeful and cheerful as he ordinarily seemed, there was in Mr.
Lincoln's disposition a strain of deep melancholy. This was not
peculiar to him alone, for the pioneers as a race were somber
rather than gay. Their lives had been passed for generations
under the most trying physical conditions, near malaria-infested
streams, and where they breathed the poison of decaying
vegetation. Insufficient shelter, storms, the cold of winter,
savage enemies, and the cruel labor that killed off all but the
hardiest of them, had at the same time killed the happy-go-lucky
gaiety of an easier form of life. They were thoughtful, watchful,
wary; capable indeed of wild merriment: but it has been said that
although a pioneer might laugh, he could not easily be made to
smile.
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